Patrick Toomey Wins Re-election in Pennsylvania Senate Race

PHILADELPHIA — Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a first-term Republican and staunch fiscal conservative who struggled to distance himself from Donald J. Trump, won his bid for re-election on Tuesday, in a blow for Democrats who had hoped to put Katie McGinty in office as Pennsylvania’s first female senator.

Mr. Toomey’s victory in this battleground state was a relief to Republicans who had feared he might become a casualty of the Trump campaign.

The race was the most expensive Senate contest in the nation. Mr. Toomey, 54, who once ran the free-market advocacy group Club for Growth, pitched himself to voters as a bipartisan deal maker, highlighting his effort to close loopholes in criminal background checks for gun buyers after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

Ms. McGinty, 53, a former aide to Gov. Tom Wolf and a onetime environmental adviser to President Bill Clinton, cast herself as a pro-business environmentalist and ran on a traditional Democratic platform, supporting abortion rights and an increased minimum wage.

With control of the Senate at stake, money poured in from outside groups, and spending topped $118 million, the Center for Responsive Politics reported.

Each side attacked the other on ethics; Republicans accused Ms. McGinty of using political ties to funnel business to a company where her husband worked as a consultant. Democrats accused Mr. Toomey of conflict of interest, holding stock in a bank of which he had been a founder while fighting new banking regulations.

But Ms. McGinty went into Election Day with a slight edge as the race tested whether Mr. Toomey could survive “the Trump drag,” said Jennifer Duffy, a nonpartisan analyst for The Cook Political Report. The senator never endorsed Mr. Trump and repeatedly ducked questions about whether he would vote for him.

On Tuesday, an hour before the polls closed, Mr. Toomey revealed that he had done so.